Well I’ve got a gal, she’s as cute as she can be
She’s a distant cousin but she’s not too distant with me

Alright, right off the bat, a quarter of a verse in to the song, we encounter incest. Some artists like to disguise their sexual messages in metaphor and other means of vague poetic language – not Elvis. With The King, you are guaranteed nothing but 100% transparency on the subject of having sex with someone that he may share a bloodline with. That’s the way The King rolls. He’s the kind of guy that will pinch the ass of a relative, and give them a coy wink. And then, after that, you, too, will want to sexually harass people that are merely a few braches away from you on your family tree.

We’ll kiss all night
I’ll squeeze her tight
But we’re kissin’ cousins ‘n that’s what makes it all right
All right, all right, all right

No. Not at all. None of that is all right, all right, all right, alright? It is true that you can set any lyrics to a jaunty, toe tapping tune and people will enjoy it regardless of what’s being said, like trance or house music. At a certain point people don’t care what you’re saying, because it’s all about being captivated by the rhythms, beat, and melody. But, as a music artist, you have to understand that there will come a time when someone is listening to your song and they finally pay the lyrics some attention instead of allowing the song to wash over them as a whole. They will ignore the rhythm, beat, and melody, and listen to what the song is all about. When this happens, you don’t want them to suddenly discover that the song is about looking at your uncle’s daughter and thinking “Gee, I’d sure like to hit that.”

Oh I’ve got a girl and she taught me how to live
She can give a lot and she’s got a lot to give

This would be a wonderful lyric in any song that wasn’t about becoming sexually intimate with family. Seeing as being sexually intimate with family is exactly what the song is about, one can only assume that the “a lot” the cousin has to give is birth defects. She can give you a child with a misplaced eye and an arm that’s a whole foot shorter than the other.

Yes we’re all cousins, that’s what I believe
Because we’re children of Adam and Eve

Elvis, your logic is flawed. Deeply, deeply flawed. Are you attempting to justify your creepy sexual fetishes by claiming that, seeing as we’re all the spawn of two religious figures, that we’re all guilty of incest in some way, shape, and form? On a genetic level, you may actually be correct. In the field of human genetics there exists the idea of Mitochondrial Eve, who is, according to Wikipedia, “the woman from whom all living humans today descend, on their mother’s side, and through the mothers of those mothers and so on, back until all lines converge on one person”. If this is the point you are making, then good on you for making this ground breaking discovery in the field of genetics decades before the idea of Mitochondrial Eve was first popularized by the January 1988 edition of Newsweek. If that is what you were doing, I commend you.

But it wasn’t. You died of a drug overdose while sitting on a toilet. That fact alone makes it difficult to believe you were, at any point in your life, one-upping world class geneticists with your ground breaking, ahead-of-its-time research and crack team of Oxford grads.

I got a girl and she wants a lot of love
That’s the kind of trouble I need plenty of

Trouble? You mean with the authorities? Well, it depends on which state you were doing your incest thing in. The song was released in 1964, and with incest laws being what they were and still are, there’s a very good chance you would have had no trouble with the law in any state in the union. Even today.